3 Ways School Prepares You For the Job World

Retrospectively, the importance of school in each of our lives ends up being a measure of relevancy. The degree to which each experience in school ultimately impacts your life, determines exactly how useful the entire experience was. A common criticism on the topic of school relevancy is that many topics focussed on in these 12 years does little to prepare a student for the job world. 3 things which all of us experience however (given the prerequisite that you consciously put effort into your studies) actively prepare us for the competitive and often overwhelming experience of job hunting.

Spending time on things that we don’t currently perceive as important (a common trend in secondary schools around the nation) is one of these things. If the average year 10 was asked how important Trigonometry was to their future, their response would most likely fall in the “not very” category. What we fail to appreciate during our secondary schooling however, is firstly how often career paths intermingle (and how quickly a supposed unnecessary skill becomes essential), and secondly how motivation towards seemingly unnecessary tasks comes across to interviewers as “going above and beyond”.

Throughout our schooling lives we also learn to work with a team of peers and a team of superiors. Not suggesting at all that our school’s teachers be viewed as ‘superior beings’, however learning to work harmoniously with your classmates, as well as following instruction and delivering your personal best to a teacher, is an exact replica of the modern day workplace. If we can learn to work effectively in this environment, chances are we can demonstrate attributes of teamwork and understand corporate culture in our job hunting years.

Highschool in particular also teaches students an important lesson about deadlines: more specifically the consequences of poor time management. If we do not maintain an effective schedule and things end up “bottlenecking”, then we have the choice of mental exhaustion by preparing something in the final 24 hours, or suffering the repercussions of missing a deadline. High school is mostly black and white about this (as is Tertiary education), again exposing the lessons many interviewers seek in the job world: efficiency, time management skills and dedication to meeting deadlines.